You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Various forms of control play a central role in our lives. Yet the nature of control is a difficult conundrum to probe. Art practices help us to make sense of questions and paradoxes related to the intertwining of control and non-control by putting it on display.
The musical universe of the 20th and 21st centuries is a force-field in which styles, instruments, personalities and stories can be found that are ascribable to conceptual frameworks that may differ greatly one from another. Such complexity cannot be traced back to single theories or all-encompassing interpretations, but may be tackled, philosophically, starting from certain characteristics. This book identifies nine such characteristics: namely, Extremes, Noise, Silence, Technology, Audience, Listening, Freedom, Disintegration, and New Media. Each of these permits us to open up unforeseen philosophical-cultural paths and interpret, in its multifarious variety, the developments of contemporary music, profoundly interwoven with the history of thought, culture and society.
Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry and allow us to understand the visual arts in papal Rome as a 'making manifest' of the fundamental truths of faith. Pallavicino's views on art and its effects differ fundamentally from the perspective developed in Bernini's biographies offering a perspective on the tension between artist and patron, work and message. In Pallavicino's writings the visual arts emerge as being intrinsically bound up with the very core of religion involving questions of idolatry, mimesis and illusionism that would prove central to the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century.
The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The third part is dedicated to the relation of theories of disinterested pleasure to the meta-aesthetical debate between realism and anti-realism. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty.
"Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to art after modernism. In it, I show that even what are typically taken to be the hardest of hard cases engage us in recognisably aesthetic ways and, as such, remain amenable to aesthetic analysis. Why, if that is true, do so many art theorists, critics and sometimes even artists appear to think otherwise? I trace the artworld's rejection of aesthetic theory to Clement Greenberg's success in co-opting the discourse of aesthetics, notably Kant's aesthetics, to underwrite his own formalism about modernist art. Not only has this led to Kant being tarred with the brush of Greenbergian formalism; it has also led critics a...
"Larvatus prodeo," announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: "I come forward, masked." Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two cent...
The origins of knowledge about the self is arguably the most fundamental problem of psychology. It is a classic theme that has preoccupied great psychologists, beginning with William James and Freud. On reading current literature, today's developmental psychologists and ethologists are clearly expressing a renewed interest in the topic. Furthermore, recent progress in the study of infant and animal behavior, provides important and genuinely new insights regarding the origins of self-knowledge.This book is a collection of current theoretical views and research on the self in early infancy, prior to self-identification and the well-documented emergence of mirror self-recognition. The focus is on the early sense of self of the young infant. Its aim is to provide an account of recent research substantiating the precursors of self-recognition and self-identification. By concentrating on early infancy, the book provides an updated look at the origins of self-knowledge.
This volume contains the Proceedings of the ‘Uralic Studies’ Seminar: The State of the Art of Uralic Studies: Tradition vs Innovation, held in Padua (Italy), November 12-13, 2016. The seminar was organized by the Department of ‘Studi Linguistici e Letterari’ of Padua University and the ‘Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia’ of Sapienza University of Rome. The aim of the seminar, and of this volume, was / is to bring together linguists working on the Uralic languages from different perspectives, with the purpose of increasing the exchange of ideas and fostering mutual influences on each other field and methods of analysis. In addition to presenting the current ‘state of the art of Uralic studies’ – for specialists, general linguists and general public – the volume also addresses some issues related to the so-called ‘Ural-Altaic theory’, nowadays often referred to as the ‘Ural-Altaic linguistic belt, unique typological belt’. The contributors to the volume are renown scholars of Uralic, and also Altaic languages, from various European universities, such as Moscow, Helsinki, Paris, Budapest etc.
Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication – in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. Each of the book’s four parts deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the problematic moments in Adorno’s reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno’s Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields.
For today's readers, the great Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) can be startlingly relevant to the social and educational divisiveness we confront at century's end: here Giuseppe Mazzotta, one of the leading Italianists in the United States, shows how much Vico, properly read, can bring to an understanding of contemporary social problems. To explore Vico's body of thought in all its monumental complexity, Mazzotta highlights the place of poetry, or "writerliness," in Vico's educational project, which links literature, history, religion, philosophy, and politics. The New Map of the World is the first book since Benedetto Croce's The Philosophy of G. B. Vico (1911) ...